Many ribbon cables are used in electronic assemblies (such as computers) to carry electrical signals from one component to another. Such ribbon cables usually include a plurality of electrical conductors positioned adjacent one another in a flat arrangement.
Many uses of such ribbon cables require the ribbon cable to make turns, sometimes in different planes. These turns tend to bend the ribbon cable, sometimes at sharp angles such as 90 or 180 degrees, such as folding the ribbon cable over onto itself to reverse direction. Such sharp angle bends sometimes damage or distort the ribbon cable, leading to problems with conductivity in the cable, sometimes providing intermittent conductivity, where sometimes a signal on a given conductor within the cable will fail and other times the signal on the same conductor will pass through properly.
Such failure in the conductor causes problems in a computer in that the signal indicates some data that is not moved from one component (a floppy disk drive, for example) to the next (the processor on the mother board, for example). This corruption of data is unacceptable in a personal computer, because the data is lost and because intermittent problems are difficult to locate and remove. For example, if the data from the floppy disk drive is not received at the processor, or is only sometimes received, is it the floppy disk drive that has failed, the processor, the mother board or the ribbon cable?
Applicants have recognized that as frequencies have increased data errors have increased. By rounding the bends in ribbon cables the number of errors is reduced. Applicants provide a rounded surface that locks the cable to provide compact and easily formed ribbon cable bends that do not breakdown easily into an unmanageable tangle.
Accordingly, the prior art ribbon assemblies have undesirable shortcomings and limitations.